


Scared to Be Lonely

by OpalizedFossil



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Origin Story, prison break - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:00:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25048060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpalizedFossil/pseuds/OpalizedFossil
Summary: Meis has been at the detention center four weeks when the redhead arrives.
Relationships: Gueira/Meis (Promare)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 36





	Scared to Be Lonely

Meis has been at the detention center four weeks when the redhead arrives.

He arrives like all the others: there’s the sound of footsteps, the single sharp sound of the alarm as the metal door slides upwards, and then a shout as the guards, armored in all black, half-kick and half-hurl a teenage kid into the cell block. The redhead hits the floor face-down and barely stops his nose from cracking against the concrete - but he’s on his feet in an instant. He fights back, like they all do at first, black smoke wafting up from the corners of his lips as he blazes from the inside out, before the metal block enclosed around his wrists encases his fire in ice and sends him clattering back to the floor in a hunk of ice that shatters on impact, sending cold shards flying. The others - there are almost two dozen of them in this cell alone, smelling powerfully of body odor and filth, stacked one on top of the other like boxes in the freezer section at the grocery store, some wrapped so tightly in bandages that they’re more dirty gauze than person - barely acknowledge him. They barely acknowledge anything now. Why should they? They’ve already lost. There is no hope, not in this place.

Meis decides not to acknowledge him, either - until the redhead suddenly lurches to his feet once more (one of them is bare, he must have lost a shoe on his way in) and ignites his flames again. Again and again and again. Each time the metal box that conceals his hands freezes him, he falls to the floor encased in ice that promptly shatters and he stands up and ignites again. He fights until he’s breathing raggedly and sweat beads on the bridge of his nose - there’s a scar on the bridge of his nose - even in the bitter cold of the cell block. Only when the smoke stops trickling from the corners of his lips and out his nostrils does he finally simmer down, sinking to his knees and propping up against the wall with a shuddering sigh. He’s finally given up, Meis thinks as he watches him with keen, blue eyes. But, come morning, the redhead is on his feet and fighting mad again, until half the cell block is shouting at him and telling him to just sit down, just shut up. But the redhead won’t. He fights and fights until even the flames must be tired. He doesn’t stop even when the guards arrive with their daily rations - lukewarm mush served with bricks of bread on metal trays, that the ones with the handcuffs on have to be fed by those without, if anyone feels generous enough to help them - and someone else eats his food, but he doesn’t care. He keeps on fighting - flaring up, fizzling out, getting frozen solid only to conjure up his stunted flames again - until the ice from within the handcuffs finally makes his fingers numb and he has to sit down, panting and huffing, chest flaring with every angry breath.

His name is Guiera, Meis finds out a few days later, when he’s finally given up his futile fight against his restraints long enough to strike up a conversation with some of the others. Most of the people in their cell block are elderly and tired and not keen on conversation - why get attached to people that could be toted down to the lab and turned to ash the next day? - which is why it’s no surprise when Gueira decides to instead latch onto him, someone his own age.

Meis isn’t much of a talker these days, but he is a good listener.

Gueira tells him that he’s from Miami and asks where he’s from. Guiera tells him that he’s been Burnish for three months, and that Freeze Force finally caught him when he erupted into flames and blew up an entire hospital ward after he found out that his mother had lost her long battle with cancer earlier that day, and that he feels so broken up about it that he wouldn’t even use his flames if he didn’t have to, but he has to. And Gueira tells him that he’s going to get them out of here someday, him and Meis, when he finally gets the handcuffs off and kicks down the door and burns the entire facility and everyone in it that isn’t Burnish to ash. He’ll save them, he says, he’ll save them all. He promises. He swears it.

“You’re so full of shit,” Meis tells him one night when Gueira whispers an escape plan in his ear, while Meis feeds him his rations. When he’s down to the last fourth of the meal, Gueira stops him.

“You need it more than me,” Gueira says.

“Don’t coddle me,” Meis warns him.

Meis eats it, anyways. The extra food feels heavy in his stomach after going so long without. He knows he’s lost too many pounds since he came here, that he’s skin and sinew stretched taut over a skeleton at this point. The metal walls of the cell are too thick with frost for him to see himself, but if he saw his reflection now, he knows he wouldn’t like what he sees. He looks at Gueira instead - suntanned, scar-nosed, red-headed Gueira, with his lithe, lean muscle and sharp brown eyes that glow from within with a fire that isn’t Burnish - and he likes what he sees. Gueira is handsome and kind and something about him foolishly gives Meis hope he forgot he had. The others feel it, too. For the first time in months, maybe years, a hushed sense of hope sluggishly returns to the detention facility. 

It continues like this for awhile. Gueira refuses to eat a fourth and then a third of his rations everyday and insists that Meis should have them instead. “You’ll need your strength when we break outta here,” Gueira tells him, and Meis grumbles the entire time he eats it before he curls up against Gueira’s flank and falls asleep until the alarms wake him the next morning. More people join their cell. Others leave, dragged away by the guards, and never return. Those who do return come back in bandages, some with gaping wounds that leak their brains and blood streaming from their noses, some with their throats charred black and their tongues gone. The horrifying things that Meis sees in that cell haunt him all night, until he can only sleep if he’s tucked tightly against Gueira’s side with the boy whispering sweet nothings and stories about Miami in his ear. “You know, I fought an alligator once,” Gueira tells him when he wakes up screaming one night, his face nuzzled right up against Meis’ neck before he drags the scarred bridge of his nose across his cheek, trying to dry his tears without his fingers. He’s long since given up on getting the cuffs off, but not even fingers frozen to their core with frostbite are enough to stop him from touching Meis.

There are rumors all around them about the experiments in the lab, about the ones who don’t come back. About the ones who do and are never quite the same, if they’re still there at all. Meis sees the glazed, haunted looks in their dead eyes and hopes he starves to death faster, so he never has to see the day when the guards come for him. Or for his Gueira.

“How did you get it?” Meis asks one day as he trails a finger over the rough scar on the bridge of Gueira’s nose.

Gueira’s shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. He’s tired now, like the rest of them. He’s weaker. Meis has noticed that he’s lost weight, but Gueira still insists that he take a third of his rations each day and Meis agrees because it makes Gueira smile and he would do anything to see that smile. “A fight,” he says simply.

“Over what?” Meis asks.

“I dunno,” Gueira laughs, batting his head against Meis’ shoulder, “Something stupid, probably.”

Gueira tells Meis a joke after that and he laughs, not because it was particularly funny but because Gueira loved to hear him laugh and he knew it. Gueira has since managed to secure them the coveted corner spot in the cell, where he can curl up at night with Meis across his lap and stay some sad semblance of warm. When he’s this close, Meis can feel his fire, somewhere inside of him, blazing brightly even now. Meis loves that about Gueira, his fire, his fight.

The cuffs come off unexpectedly one day, when a guard arrives early in the morning and grabs Meis by the arm and tries to haul him towards the door. Gueira is on his feet in an instant, and not even the ice from within the handcuffs can stop his fire now. The entire cell block is engulfed in blazing red flame as Gueira springs at the guard like an animal. It happens in an instant and, when it’s over, the guard is nothing but a charred black husk on the floor and there’s melted frost dripping down the walls and Gueira is stumbling backwards in horror at what he’s done. He didn’t mean to kill him, he didn’t mean to kill anybody...

Meis runs to him and hugs him tight, then grabs him by a hand that’s more ice than flesh after months locked inside the restraints and lurches for the door. It slams closed with the blare of an alarm before they ever reach it.

Gueira is punished with the collar.

The guard’s body is removed, and then Gueira is cornered by five others who crowd him into the back of the cell and shoot him, not with bullets, not with lead, but with ice. It hits him in the Adam’s apple and he chokes sickeningly, before it spreads into a thin line that encircles his neck and crystallizes into icicles. Gueira coughs and shakes his head like a maddened animal, black smoke dripping from the corners of his lips. He tells Meis later, after the guards have gone, that it’s the worst pain he’s ever felt, the collar.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Meis says.

“I killed a man today,” Gueira replies softly and, for the first time, he can thread Meis’ fingers between his, although they’re cold with thawing frostbite and black as the smoke that drifts idly from his nostrils with every breathe, “and I would kill a hundred more if it meant keeping you safe. It was awful, it was total shit, but I would, Meis.”

Now that Gueira can touch him with his hands, he touches him all over. Meis whines when he traces the divots between his ribs (tomorrow, it will be half his rations instead of a third, he already knows), the shape of his collarbone, the places in his ears that used to be pierced before the guards plucked the bits of metal from the cartilage and threw them away. Gueira holds his hand and squeezes, wraps his calloused, cold fingers around Meis’ tiny wrists. He even touches his cheeks, and Meis shivers at the cold of his hands before he leans in and kisses him, long and deep and like his life depends on it. They’re still kissing, in the gentle, sweet way of teenagers with their first loves, when the guards come for Gueira the next day.

Meis spends the day trembling in the corner and sobbing while the others try and fail to console him, certain that the last time he’ll ever see Gueira is when the guards sprang on him in his sleep and dragged him away, kicking and huffing and smoking with anger. His punishment was never intended to end with the collar.

Instead, Guiera is treated to the fate worse than death. When the guards bring him back, he’s limping and wrapped chest to knee in gauze soaked through with blood, drying blackish brown. They weren’t experimenting on him, Gueira tells Meis later, as the black-haired boy cradles him in his lap and kisses him, they were just torturing him. For revenge, and maybe just for fun. His body aches even as the flames lick his wounds and seek to heal them, but their progress is greatly impeded by the collar of ice that sits heavy and cold around his throat.

“Feels like it’s burnin’ into my skin,” Gueira whispers, his breath coming out in wisps of white in the bitter chill of the cell.

Meis kisses him softly. “Focus on me instead. I’m here.”

“You’re here,” Gueira repeats, and he feels better.

Morning comes after the most painful night of Gueira’s life thus far. And this time, when the guards come for Meis, Gueira is too weak to fight them. Meis fights them for him, blue fire blazing hot on his breath as he lights black armor on fire, but it’s quickly extinguished. He kicks. He screams. Gueira lifts his head off the floor and shouts after him, and the last thing Meis hears is the tears choking his voice before he’s dragged away.

Gueira is pacing the length of the cell block with black smoke billowing from his nostrils when the guards return. Meis hits the floor like a broken doll and then the door is closing yet again, blocking out all light, all hope. Gueira gathers him up in his arms, cradles him, and cries. Meis cries, too - but only from one eye. The flames encircle the wound behind its bloody, blackened dressing, but they can only turn the skin around the empty socket to scar now. There’s no eye left for them to heal. From that day forward, Meis always keeps his long hair hanging purposefully over the right side of his face. He doesn’t want the others to see his scar, to see his missing eye. And from that day forward, Meis is angry. The fight that was always in Gueira alights anew in him, and Meis blazes right there beside him.

“They did this to you,” Gueira growls as he strokes the quickly forming scar through its bandage, “I’ll kill ‘em. I’ll kill ‘em all. And this time, I won’t regret it.”

“We’ll kill ‘em,” Meis agrees, his voice hollow, “We’re gonna make them pay.”

Meis attacks a guard with piercing blue flames three weeks later and is rewarded with the same ice collar as Gueira. “You were right,” he says that night, coughing and choking while Gueira strokes his hair to soothe him, “This is the worst shit I’ve ever felt. Ever. Even worse than when they ripped out my eye. ‘s so bad, Gueira.”

“It hurts less with time,” Gueira tells him, before he kisses the empty place where Meis’ right eye once was, “But it doesn’t matter, because I’m still gonna get you outta here. I swear it, Meis. If it’s the last thing I do.”

“If we keep this up,” Meis chuckles, giving Gueira’s hand a squeeze, “it might really be the last.”

“Shhh…,” Gueira says, bringing him in close to his chest. His heart beats funny ever since the guards took him away that day. It misses a beat sometimes. But Meis is the only one who seems to notice it. “Tell us about Dallas, cowboy. Tell us about the good times.”

“There weren’t good times,” Meis tells him, “There never were.”

Gueira holds him tighter. “Then we’ll make our own.”

A week later, the guards come for an elderly woman who has been in their block since before Meis arrived. Gueira attacks him. Meis joins him. And, when the other guards come to collect his charred remains, they separate them. It should have been obvious from the beginning that their flames were too dangerous to stay together, but the guards have always underestimated them. It will be their last mistake, as even now, they only move them into separate cells that sit side-by-side on one hall of many, and Gueira and Meis continue to plot in secret code through the wall, secrets spoken in raps and knocks on the cold metal.

When the time comes, Gueira waits for the guard to come with their rations and attacks him. This time, he makes it outside his cell with two dozen others behind him, dragging the guard, half-human and half-charcoal, over to Meis’ cell, to scan his thumb on the lock until the door clicks open. On the other side, Meis is ready, emerging with blue fire already blazing. The alarms sound and the guards come in swarms, but there are too many of them now. Glancing sideways at his partner as he ignites the halls in blue flame, Gueira thinks Meis looks eerily beautiful now that he’s free.

It wasn’t an elaborate escape plan - wait for their rations, attack the guard, free the others, overwhelm the facility - but it worked, if only because Freeze Force was still in its infancy then and too unorganized and unprepared to fight them in groups that size. It’s enough for them to break free, blazing holes through electric fences that short out from their fire and fleeing into the city beyond. Their group splits up, going in too many directions at once for anyone to follow them. Later, once the helicopters have stopped flitting overhead with their spotlights shining down on the streets, the Burnish reunite on the outskirts of town, where the city gives way to the Waste beyond, a place where no one will follow them. Probably. For now.

Gueira and a few others separate from the group to move across town and gather supplies - if stealing from a convenience store could ever count as ‘gathering supplies’ - and meet Meis and the others in the desert. Travel is slow with this many people, but Gueira refuses to leave anyone behind who doesn’t want to take their chances inside the city. Some decide to leave, to attempt to carve out a living within the city limits, but most of them trust Meis and Gueira. They disappear into the Waste. Two days later, Meis finds the burnt-out shell of an abandoned gas station that burned down to its foundation in the Great World Blaze on a scouting mission. There’s enough of the roof left to keep them dry in the rain, so they settle there, for now. But, they all know that they can’t stay long, they can never stay in one place long. Someone passes from their wounds later that week, and Gueira and Meis stand watch as their body turns to ashes in a silent vigil. Only when the last of their embers has burnt out does Meis bury his face in Gueira’s chest and allow himself to cry from his one eye. “Freeze Force will pay,” he sobs.

“Foresight will pay,” Gueira adds, squeezing him tighter. He needs to find them some clothes; his own abdomen is covered in bandages gone crusty with grime and Meis’ prison-issued shirt is in tatters after their escape. Most of them have no shoes. 

Meis growls against his chest, small and fierce. “They’re all going to pay.”

Gueira strokes the scar that’s grown over Meis’ empty eye socket and frowns. “Yeah. They will.”

Meis figures it out first, on the night after their latest supply run, when he’s practicing with his flames out in the desert and absentmindedly thinks back to the motorcycle that had roared past them in the street earlier that day. It was an expensive chopper, with handlebars hanging high over the driver, the sort of showboat that Foresight’s people might drive. He twists his flames at a cactus, opening his eyes to watch it wither and burn, and scrambles backwards in alarm when a chopper made of glowering flame crashes into it and dissipates instead. 

The next time he tries it, he imagines the dirtbike he had back home in Dallas instead. The flames aren’t hot to the Burnish, so it’s no trouble to sit on it and, when he wants to ride it, the fire answers his call exactly like a real bike would. Gueira claps for him, mouth hanging open in awe until he swallows a late summer mosquito and nearly chokes on it, and tries it himself.

The next time Gueira and Meis raid a convenience store, it’s in intricate armor that shines like obsidian and covers their faces. An entire street’s worth of people flee in terror of the horrible fanged monsters on their flaming bikes, and the pair return to the others with enough food for them to eat well for two nights, before the Freeze Force helicopters come too near to their hideout and they have to relocate again. A few more of their people have turned to ash since their escape, either from wounds or from age, and those who remain are strong, young, and burning from within with anger at the world that imprisoned and tortured them.

Once the group has settled into a new hideout, Gueira seems eerily gloomy. It doesn’t suit him and Meis doesn’t like it. He steps outside to join him on watch duty, slipping down in his lap beside a bonfire of his glaring red flames.

“You’re quiet,” Meis says, “What’s wrong? It ain’t like you.”

“Just thinkin’,” Gueira says, but not before he wraps an around around Meis’ waist and holds him tight, “that this is really all there ever is for us. We’re gonna run all our lives. We’ll run and run and run...but, Meis, they’re gonna catch us one day.”

“What would you do, if you weren’t on the run right now?” Meis wonders.

Gueira kisses the side of his face. “I dunno. Probably kiss you, like, a lot. Maybe take you to see a movie, yeah?”

“Let’s go stargazing instead,” Meis says with a smile, tipping his head back purposefully to look at the night sky glowing with moonlight overhead. 

Gueira laughs. “‘s nice, Meis. Real pretty. Like you.”

“Shuddup,” Meis says, then leans back into Gueira’s chest and looks up at him with a smile, “Let’s not run anymore.”

“What would we do if we didn’t run?” Gueira asks.

“Let’s fight back instead.”

Gueira stands beside Meis in the inferno that remains of a Foresight Pharmaceuticals building three weeks later. Their fire blazes violet between them and, in the cool lavender shadows that it casts across Meis’ paper-white face, Gueira thinks he looks more beautiful than ever. He reaches for his hand, the two of them running away only when the sirens start to blare on the next street over. “Let’s fight back instead,” Gueira agrees wholeheartedly once they’re a safe distance away and he’s caught his breath.

The Burnish are angry. Gueira and Meis stoke their anger and encourage them to burn. Promepolis descends into terror of the ones who call themselves the Mad Burnish, and word spreads far and wide of their name.

It’s eleven years later when the name Mad Burnish first reaches the ears of Lio Fotia, and he summons his fiery motorcycle to blaze through the desert with him in search of the ones called Gueira and Meis.

**Author's Note:**

> The "ice collar" idea was taken from [andr0nap](https://twitter.com/andr0nap) on Twitter, who has tons of great Gueimeis headcanons! Give them a follow! :)


End file.
